You know... after hearing Dabuz talk about Rosa without Luma on stream, I'm starting to think that Smash 4's inconsistency comes from it's characters, not necessarily from other factors. Every top tier character has some huge strength balanced out by a grand and obvious weakness.
Sheik - struggles to close a stock, allowing for huge comebacks
Rosa - Success depends on whether Luma is around
Cloud - Doesn't recover sometimes
Fox - Doesn't get back to stage at all sometimes
ZSS - Everything involving her rage setups
Mario - Easily walled out
Mewtwo - The poster child for glass cannon
Ryu - Gets camped out hard
The only three top tiers I can't think of huge weaknesses like that for are Bayo, Diddy, and Marth. In that order too - Marth's disadvantage is very meh, Diddy's disadvantage is occasionally linear, and Bayo... sometimes has lag?
I get the idea of having some sort of weakness as a means to balance a game. But I don't recall any other game in the series having top tiers with weaknesses nearly as prevalent as their strengths. And I could be totally wrong about that, so people with more experience - please let me know. But from what I've seen, it looks like top tiers didn't have weaknesses nearly so exploitable in other games.
Smash 4 has a familiar rotation of top players that generally get top 8 to top 16 depending on how many of them show up in a given tournament. The top level is moderately consistent.
However, I’ll throw out something else to consider about the Smash 4 meta and its consistency that takes a different angle:
Every character in this game has knowable attributes and interactions. The systems we have in the game, while occasionally obtuse, are also knowable.
I’d suggest the main issue we have is that our top players struggle with maintaining peak performance levels across all levels of competition. This is something that a competitor in anything needs to optimize. Easy example: look at LeBron James, he has ups and downs in individual games, but generally, he maintains a high level of performance across dozens of games under varying levels of pressure.
Recently, in the modern Smash community we have two examples of players who regularly achieve that high level of consistency: Armada and Hungrybox. Armada is notorious for his rigorous, systemic approach to practicing (also known as
practicing in any other sport). Hungrybox seems to have pushed through some mental barriers and is now simply playing to win, every time, and everything else flows from there.
Smash 4 has one of the slowest metas I’ve seen. In part, this is due to the training mode being awful. In another part, we have a bunch of new adults that are all individually trying to figure out how to bridge the gap from amateur competitor to professional. And I mean that in terms of mentality.
There are solutions, of course, and they are fairly obvious (sort of), but that’s for another post.
